regressive left

You may remember my rant on the “Regressive Left”, a phrase used by those wishing to disparage the views of those on the left who approach cultural mismatches with tact and pragmatism. Well, those on the right have had a pop at Peter Tatchell this week on Twitter. I’m so pleased that a well-known figure such as him is standing up for sensitive and intelligent handling of difficult issues. Here’s some of the highlights:

Oh, wait, smearing LGBT folk looking out for ordinary Muslims as “the regressive left”, or “turkeys voting for Christmas” is actually doing the far-right’s work for them. Whoopsy!

When you stand up for human rights, you need to consider a set of universal values. You don’t get to downplay the rights of one group just because some of them hold objectionable views – that would be moral relativism, and I thought that was a bad thing, no? They are still human beings. We even have to extend that truth to the racists. They are but human, sadly.

Here we are with another example of skeptics making thinking errors that they’d pick up on if someone else did it. However this is a bit more than just a failure of logic – it’s also a distortion of the original term. While words can and do change meaning, it doesn’t mean that we can appropriate a phrase and twist it to mean whatever we feel like. We get all pissy when “deniers” are referred to as “skeptics”, so let’s not be hypocrites as well, eh?

However, this phrase is really doing the rounds on the internet at the moment, applied to anyone who is prepared to step outside of their comfort zone and find common ground with those who are different. A significant part of the problem is hostility to religious folk, something written about here, by Hayley Is A Ghost. And the atheist community’s favourite example of such “loony left” behaviour is the Goldsmith’s LGBT Society’s support of the University’s Islamic Society.

Here’s a summary of what happened:

The SU’s Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society invited Maryam Namazie to give a presentation. Some members of the Islamic Society were unhappy about this and attended the talk with the intention of interrupting her and preventing her from speaking. With SUs being what they are, and student bodies being willing to support the oppressed, reports of what happened were misrepresented as the event being discriminatory to Muslims, and many people were outraged about it (which would have been a fair response if that was what actually happened). Other student societies who campaign for social justice stood in solidarity with the Islamic Society, because they saw an alignment of principles. And this is where it started to go really, really wrong.

Now, the LGBT & Feminist Societies aren’t populated by idiots. These are educated, if idealistic, young adults standing up for human rights in spite of the knowledge that Islam isn’t totally OK with women and The Gays. It was the problem of perceived oppression that was the issue. It’s something that many of us would do if we believed that people were being unjustly treated, even if we don’t personally share all the values of the group we seek to assist.

In keeping with their behaviour at Namazie’s talk, the Islamic Society then behaved in a not-entirely-honourable fashion:

Oh dear.

#cringe

It was rather amusing to see this clash of cultures played out in the Twittersphere, but I never thought of it as anything more than an awkward misjudgement of the character of others. The LGBT and Feminist Societies acted in good faith, and perhaps naively, expected others to do so as well. Anyone with half a brain knows that #notallmuslims are like this, and it should have just ended as an unfortunate incident that hopefully teaches us to be more aware of others’ motivations. But no! Never ones to miss an anti-theist bandwagon, it really captured the imagination of the skeptical movement, and not to be discriminatory in their nature, they then aimed their mockery at SUs as well as Islam – in particular any of the left-leaning societies (this is a weird thing, most skeptics I know are left-of-centre, yet right-wing ideas are very popular if they push the right buttons. Maybe we’re not sceptical enough).

One thing I heard was that they were like “turkeys voting for Christmas”, and that Skeptical Trump Card, The Regressive Left (booooooooooooooooooooo!). Well, at the time, I felt quite off about it, but it wasn’t clear enough in my mind to articulate my opposition to it. But the popularity of this idea grew, and it got more tiresome with every minute. And so, here’s some commentary from the recent #womensmarch:

I wonder how much this person cares about women’s rights on days they can’t point out a contradiction?

It featured heavily on my timeline, and, well, I’m not one to let these things slide:

Of course I had to weigh in. Friends don’t let friends make dumbass mistakes like this.

This person, commenting elsewhere, summed up how I feel about the whole debacle:

I decided to educate myself on the identity of woman in the picture, with the US flag headscarf. Her name is Munira Ahmed, and she intended the image to demonstrate that she, as a Muslim, is as American as anyone else. And it’s an important point: Muslims are as diverse as just about any population you can think of. The caricature of Muslims perpetuated by the New Atheist Movement is horribly simplistic and creates division. We can’t say with any integrity that we will not support those women who look different from us, or those who are oppressed by our country’s actions. And what about Muslim women who do feel oppressed by the headscarf? Do we support them, but only as long as they take it off when in our presence? Of course it is possible to hold both beliefs: that Muslims are human beings who we should care about, and that the headscarf can be a tool of female oppression. That doesn’t seem so regressive to me.

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